Hamas ready to cede control of Gaza, official says

TEL AVIV, Israel — Hamas is willing to cede political power and administrative governance of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian unity government, but would not disarm unless an independent Palestinian state is achieved, Dr. Basem Naim, a senior political official for Hamas, told NBC News.

“We are ready today, if not yesterday, to step back from governance to hand it over to a body, a government, a committee, that is ready to run the Gaza Strip,” Naim said.

Naim made his comments during a critical impasse: the first phase of a tenuous deal between Hamas and Israel is set to end on Saturday, and no arrangements have been made for continuing the ceasefire.

While there have been few publicly acknowledged negotiations to extend the truce into a second phase, the office of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it will soon send a diplomatic delegation to Cairo to continue talks.

Naim said that beyond that public announcement, Hamas had not been officially notified of Israel’s intention to resume negotiations.

It was unclear whether Israeli officials would seek to extend the first phase of the agreement or negotiate terms for a second phase, which could ultimately lead to a more permanent ceasefire and the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

Naim said Israel was deliberately delaying further negotiations to create a pretext for returning to war against Hamas.

“We believe that this is intentionally done to escalate the situation or to push the second-phase negotiations under the threat to return back to war and not to withdraw from the Gaza Strip,” he said.

Israeli troops are supposed to start withdrawing from the Gaza-Egypt border area on Saturday, marking the end of the ceasefire’s first phase. However, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen told public broadcaster Kan on Thursday that Israel has demanded that their military stay in the Philadelphi Corridor, which runs along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

The last step of the agreement’s six-week first phase came overnight, when Israel released more than 600 Palestinian prisoners after Hamas handed over the corpses of four Israeli hostages killed during captivity in the Gaza Strip.

Under the ceasefire’s terms — which were inked with help from intermediaries Qatar and Egypt in late January, after more than a year of fraught negotiations — talks on the second stage should have begun weeks ago.

But rather than returning to the negotiating table, each side has repeatedly accused the other of violating the agreement’s terms. Several of the weekly exchanges of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners have been dogged by last-minute accusations and near-cancellations.

Hamas has stated before that it is willing to cede governance of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian body, and Israel has made clear that any plan for Gaza’s “day after” should not include Hamas, which led the Oct. 7 terror attack on southern Israel. On that day, about 1,200 people were killed and 250 were kidnapped, according to local officials, sparking Israel’s 15-month war on Gaza that has killed at least 48,300 people, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, and destroyed much of the enclave.

The thorniest question standing in the way of negotiating the second phase of an agreement remains whether or not Hamas will disarm. Netanyahu has declared Hamas’ destruction as the primary goal of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip — sometimes, his critics have said, superseding the freedom and welfare of the Israeli hostages still being held there.

Though he reiterated Hamas’ offer to integrate into a Palestinian unity government, Basem Naim said the group would only disarm and transform into a purely political party if Palestinians are granted an independent political state — a condition that Netanyahu and his right-wing allies in government have repeatedly rejected.

“These are two different tracks. The arms are related to the existence or the presence of the occupation,” he said, referring to Israel’s ongoing presence in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

If an independent Palestinian state is created, Naim said, “we are ready again to become a political party and to integrate our fighters into a Palestinian national army.”

Israeli military leaders have repeatedly made clear that they are prepared to return to war if the agreement collapses, going so far as to call up reservists for renewed fighting.

Though Hamas remains committed to the ceasefire agreement, Naim said, the group is also preparing for renewed fighting.

“If they decide to escalate and to return back to war, we are preparing ourselves for all options,” he said. “We have no choice other than to defend ourselves, as we have done already along the 15 months.”